Network

radio silence

The reason I haven't posted for a week is that I've been out of town and lacked the ability conveniently to post.

I use my portable tablet computer to keep up with e-mail, assuming there's wi-fi I can access, but typing on the little popup keyboard is not conducive to writing at greater than minimal length. I did choose my hotel in part because it had a business center, guest-usable desktop computers, but I found on my first evening that both computers were frozen in awkward positions, and while the desk clerk agreed to put in a request for repair, nothing had been done by the time I left. Of course, there was a holiday weekend in there.

One of the hotel's two elevators was also out of service. Good thing that wasn't both of them, because my room was on the tenth floor.

The hotel was located in downtown Pittsburgh. The one in Pennsylvania. I was there - by far the furthest away from home I've gone since before the pandemic - on a compulsion I could not possibly resist, not that I wished to resist it. It was my brother's wedding. (He lives and works in Pittsburgh, as does his wife, who's a native of the area.) It took longer for him than it did for me to "find his person," as they put it in the ceremony, but he definitely has. I've met her a few times before, and they're ideal for each other.

The ceremony was held at the Grand Concourse, an elaborate and colorful preserved 19C train station converted into the kind of restaurant you'd visit for a special occasion, of which this was certainly one. There were about 30 guests, tucked into the corner of one small room for the ceremony, after which we spread out somewhat further for a very fine dinner in another room, one with a stunning view of the Monongahela River and downtown opposite.

It was a highly personalized occasion, and cherishable for all who attended. Among the guests were a couple old friends (i.e. since childhood) of my brother's, whom I know but hadn't seen in a long time. One of them is a rabbi, and he conducted the ceremony.

Part of the service was the reading of a modern version of the seven blessings, a Jewish ritual that was new to me. Seven people close to the couple were asked, and I and my other brother were among them. We each stood up, identified ourselves, and read a blessing as modified by the couple, and, at least in my case (I read the Wisdom blessing) elaborated on a bit by me: it seemed to fit the circumstances.

There was more to the celebration than the ceremony and dinner, and I'll say more about that, and about Pittsburgh - which I've been to before, but never deposited in downtown on my own resources - tomorrow.

Entry tags:

books

Reading Wednesday

Just finished: Bad Cree by Jessica Johns. I really enjoyed this one, with the caveat that it was hyped to me as the most disturbing thing, read it before giving it to a student, etc., and it was a very different (if very good) kind of book. Though possibly my calibration for disturbing is way off. I did find it a very strong story about family and community vs. extractive industries and the MMIWG epidemic, and one of the best use of dreams in fiction I've seen since we all decided that kind of thing was gauche.

What Feasts At Night by T. Kingfisher. I enjoyed this one too. After barely surviving the events of the first book, our lead and ka (?) companions return to their home (fictional) country, where the caretaker of the estate has suddenly died. The villagers won't go near the place and claim that it's haunted by a creature that sits on your chest and sucks out your breath. So, they have to fight it, all while dealing with PTSD from the war. Fun stuff.

Two things I particularly liked about this: 1) it actually was disturbing as shit, especially the scene with the horses. 2) this is kind of the reverse of what I complained about with Someone You Can Build a Nest In in terms of queernormative fantasy settings. The imaginary country is integrated into the Serbo-Bulgarian War, but it is clearly a country with different norms, myths, and traditions. The novella has a nonbinary lead, and this identity is important and plays a role in their backstory, but it also has a different meaning and definition that in would have in our world (it's important to note that this is queernormative and Alex doesn't appear to be discriminated against in their society, but there are still gendered expectations and roles). It contributes to the worldbuilding as well, so there are different pronouns for both God and priests, and that adds interest rather than erases difference. Anyway, it is pretty cool.

Currently reading: The Siege of Burning Grass by Premee Mohamed. This one was also really hyped up and I can see why. There's a longstanding war between two empires: Varkal (which is kind of industrial-age but uses genetically altered animals as its technology) and Med’ariz (which has floating cities and more technologically based weapons). The causes and parameters of this war are deliberately fuzzy to the POV characters, but Med'ariz seems to be winning. Alefrat, the leader of the pacifist resistance in Varkal, is blown up, kidnapped, and imprisoned by his government, and let out on the condition that he travel to the Med'ariz front line, infiltrate them, and create the same kind of grassroots uprising that he did in Varkal. He's accompanied by Qhudur, a brutal soldier/prison guard.

This is very good so far; it pulls no punches either in its depiction of war or its depiction of disability (Alefrat's leg was blown off before the story begins, and there's a bizarro doctor who had started to regrow it with wasps, and the entire thing is very nasty). It's definitely problematizing pacifism and its role in defanging political movements, though I am not sure where the author/narrative is ultimately going to fall on this. It feels like a slog, and this is intentional; every inch of the characters' journey is painstakingly fought for, and you feel it.

real ones by Katherena Vermette. I really liked the other book I read by Vermette; this one is better. It's about two sisters, June and lyn, whose father is Michif and mother is white. Said mother, Renee, is an acclaimed artist winning all the arts grants by pretending to also be Métis. When her identity is exposed, the sisters are not only faced with digging up the trauma of their childhood (this is nowhere near the only shitty thing Renee has done) but having their own identities, careers, and community ties thrown into question.

Pretendians are somewhat of a national obsession here, and I don't weigh into it much because it's not at all my business, and it's a source of pain for Indigenous folks that I don't want to accidentally aggravate. Besides just being a really good story, this is an amazing look into the psychology of someone who fakes Indigenous ancestry and how it affects everyone around her. I haven't seen this tackled in fiction at all and Vermette does it spectacularly. It's also weirdly relatable in the relationship that the sisters have with their mother—growing up with a mostly-absent conman father, I get how they can't bring themselves to cut off Renee entirely even when she wrecks destruction in their lives.

Also the look at the media and arts landscape of Canada is just spot on. Perfect. It's so good.

Current Mood: photographical
Current Location: 'ereabouts

Plas Mawr

Conwy also has a very fine Elizabethan mansion with amazing plasterwork!

This is probably the finest Elizabethan building in the UK.

The Front entrance with the arms of Elizabeth I:

( Here be pics! )

Wednesday's comic!

https://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20250528s

I'm fairly sure he harbors that same hope.

(no subject)

Happy birthday,

genarti and

green_knight!

Current Mood: calm

Entry tags:

2025/080: Glorious Exploits — Ferdia Lennon

2025/080: Glorious Exploits — Ferdia Lennon

[They say] that keeping them here in the pits is too much, that it goes beyond war. They say we should just kill them, make them slaves or send them home, but ah, I like the pits. It reminds us that all things must change. I recall the Athenians as they were a year ago: their armour flashing like waves when the moon is upon them, their war cries that kept you up at night, and set the dogs howling, and those ships, hundreds of ships gliding around our island, magnificent sharks ready to feast.[loc. 131]

I reviewed this back in December 2023: prepublication review. Since then, I've been puzzled by readers saying they'd expected something light-hearted and humorous -- then I discovered that it won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction 2024, and that it was being promoted as 'bold and funny', 'Fierce, funny, fast-paced', 'hilarious' etc. Reading these plaudits, you may be surprised to find that the novel's mostly set in a concentration camp, where prisoners (chained and starving) are regularly beaten to death.

( Read more... )

Current Location: semi-basement apartment

Entry tags:

CRUD Challenge: Parasite (2019)

Parasite (2019) dir. Bong Joon-ho

When we first meet the Kim family of Seoul, South Korea, they're living in a cramped, insect-infested basement apartment. No one currently has a paying job, so they're having to steal wi-fi from the neighbors to try to get any quick temp assignments they can, like folding pizza boxes for a day. Ki Woo (Choi Woo-sik), the eldest son, wasn't able to get into college despite his good English skills, and wasn't able to turn his mandatory military service into a lasting career. However, his school friend Min (Park Seo-joon), who did get into a good university, drops by and offers Ki Woo a tempting job opportunity.

Min has been the English tutor to wealthy high school girl Park Da Hye (Jung Ji-so) for a while, but is headed overseas for further study. He rather fancies Da Hye and plans to court her once she is also an adult, so doesn't want to turn her tutoring over to some other fellow he can't trust. With his excellent English skills and trustworthiness, Ki Woo is someone Min thinks can do the job properly. Problem! Ki Woo doesn't have any of the qualifying documents or references. Min suggests just lying--Park mother Yeon Kyo (Cho Yeo-jeong) is not the brightest and is easily fooled.

Ki Woo's artistic but kind of lazy sister Ki Jung (Park So-dam) whips him up some fake documents to make it look like he went to a good school. Yeon Kyo is mildly buzzed during the job interview and sure enough doesn't notice anything wrong. She also gives him the Western name "Kevin" as English tutors use such names and it sounds classier to her. Yeon Kyo does oversee the first lesson, and Ki Woo demonstrates that he's actually pretty good at tutoring. She happens to mention that her young son Da Song (Jung Hyun-jun) needs a new art tutor as the extremely active boy keeps driving them off.

This gives an opportunity for Ki Woo to introduce Ki Jung as "Jessica", a friend of a friend who's Korean-American and went to art school in Chicago. Ki Jung does a quick wiki search on "art therapy" and bullshits her way through the interview, but does catch that Da Song is working through some trauma and bonds with the boy. She also realizes that this scam can be extended to get her parents employed as well.

Driver Yoon (Park Keun-rok) is easily framed to get him replaced by Kim patriarch Ki Taek (Song Kang-ho), who among his many short-lived previous jobs has picked up excellent driving skills. Housekeeper Moon Gwang (Lee Jeong-eun) is harder to dislodge, as she came with the house (the original owner was also the designer, famed architect Namgoong.) It takes discovering a secret weakness to get her replaced by the Kim mother, Chung Sook (Jang Hye-jin), a former athlete and also a good cook. At last, the entire family is making good money!

However, the Namgoong house has a dark secret hidden within its walls, and the Kim family are about to reap the consequences of their actions.

This contemporary thriller won Best Picture at the Oscars, the first time a foreign-language film had ever done so. It has darkly comedic moments before the full reveal of what's going on and the horrific climax.

The movie leans heavily into social commentary. For example, the Kim family has decently good clothing for job seeking, as many poor people do, but their substandard living conditions have given them a distinct scent that marks them apart from the rich Park family. Once Park father Dong-ik (Lee Sun-kyun) notices it, he can't stop commenting on the smell, not noticing how this is getting under the skin of Ki Taek.

And despite their wealth and social status, the Park family isn't a very happy one. They're estranged from each other in various ways, so it's easy for the Kim family to fill emotional needs for them. It's not that the Parks are evil, or even particularly mean, but they are thoughtless and insensitive, especially Dong-ik.

The movie is shot well, with sets designed to symbolize the themes of social difference and division, and how poverty "flows downhill." The acting is skillful enough to overcome the language barrier even for those not used to subtitles.

At first, it doesn't seem like the Kim family's plans are all that bad. They're good at the jobs they're applying for, and scamming rich people in return for actual value can come off as an objectively funny crime. But depriving other people of jobs hurts them (Ki Woo and Ki Taek have a brief moment of conscience over the fate of Driver Yoon), and there is more at stake than they initially realize. Their greed gets people killed.

Content note: Gory violence, some fatal. There's on-screen but clothed sex. Ki Woo and Da Hye are attracted to each other--he's an adult and she's a minor, though Ki Woo (and Min) state that he's going to wait until she's out of high school before going further. A person's allergies are deliberately triggered. Classism. Usage of Native American stereotypes. Sewage erupts through a toilet. Some rough language. This is definitely an "R" movie.

Overall: This is very different from the other Best Pictures I've watched this month which gives it extra punch. Bong is a good director, and I like all the movies I've seen of his. Most recommended to thriller fans with strong literacy so they can follow the subtitles.

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: Fernley, Nevada

Entry tags:

day jobbe

Back to Work

I guess it's just as well that every day in the past weekend I didn't sleep any more than one hour past my usual alarm time, and in one case woke up ahead of it. This morning I was up 15 minutes before the alarm.

The only odd thing was that I got hungry earlier than usual, so took my lunch closer to "mid day," measuring from my 5:30 AM PT start time.

To my surprise, there was not a flood of support tickets. Maybe other people actually took the holiday off, too.

Entry tags:

fanfic:promptfic

Only One Bed meme

Stolen / respectfully borrowed from

rionaleonhart, a Tumblr meme now removed from its native ecosystem and repotted on DW [ETA: now tweaked a bit]:

Give me any two (or more) characters from a canon I’m familiar with, and I’ll tell you how they would cope in an ‘oh no, there’s only one bed’ scenario!

What you get might be anything from brief headcanons/thoughts to a small fic, depending on how much I have to say about those particular characters.

(Currently traveling, staying overnight on the road, would enjoy some fun distraction.)

Update: Based on how the comments are going, I edited the instructions slightly to hopefully bend the requests a little more towards characters from the same canon. (If you want two characters from different canons, feel free to ask for it - there are no wrong answers, it's very open-ended - but I'm really only going to be able to do headcanons for those, as I can't easily write crossovers, and I'm hoping for some of the other kind of prompts too!)

Entry tags:

WWI: LM Montgomery

Rilla of Ingleside
The Blythes are Quoted

The first Anne book I ever read was Anne of Ingleside (largely because it was the only one my mother had, although I did also possess an uncanny childish talent for starting at the wrong end of serieses, cf being handed a clutch of five Chalet books including School (#1) and starting instead with Redheads (#52), and although I did eventually go back and read the earlier ones in a more conventional fashion, I read Rilla relatively early and have always found it a favourite. At the beginning Rilla overhears a comment in the beginning about the years between 15 and 19 being the best in a girl’s life - which, as well as being a bit depressing in general, for Rilla, born with the century, means that these are the years of the Great War. Rilla goes through a lot during the book - adopting a war orphan, falling in love, losing a brother - and she does grow up, but Montgomery keeps her recognisable and believable to the last (lisp). But it's not just Rilla - Susan Baker, the Blythe family's housekeeper, has also resolved to be a heroine despite not being young and pretty, and she does achieve this (and gets a more satisfactory romance resolution into the bargain).

Montgomery started writing the book in 1919, and it does an excellent job of taking her established characters through the war, drawing on her own experience but always making it feel distinct to her fictional as well as the historical truths. It is fixed on the Canadian Home Front experience, rather than actually going to the Front (as Bruce and Turner do), and it is dense with detail. It is also dense with patriotism - the sole pacifist character is vilified - but I do think it is a more nuanced and examined treatment than in Bruce. Walter is genuinely reluctant to go to war, and it is not all jovial banter in the trenches (hence Susan needing to add a nit comb to her sewn-up package to Jem) or steadfast heroines at home - it is clear how much those at home cannot ever forget the dangers. Montgomery was a fervent supporter of the war effort in the early years, with her diaries showing how deeply she felt every piece of news, but this shifted - her husband, a Presbyterian minister, actually had a breakdown over having encouraged the young men of his congregation to sign up and die or be horribly scarred.

The Blythes are Quoted was only published in full in 2009, but it was delivered to Montgomery’s publishers on the day of her death (quite likely a suicide) in 1942. It reworks a clutch of short stories published elsewhere in order to add Blythe references, and strings them together with snippets of the family, as well as poems allegedly written by either Anne or Walter and read out lout to everyone. It is bitter and bleak about both wars, the past and the one it’s written during, and Anne ends up saying that she is thankful that Walter did not come back, and that his sacrifice was futile. It features Walter’s war poem, The Piper, (which in addition to being anodyne and simplistic, does not include the “break faith” bits quoted in Rilla), but concludes with a poem apparently written by Walter the night before he died, from the pov of a soldier who has just joyfully killed an enemy “boy”.

Montgomery herself was terrified that her younger son would be conscripted (the older was rejected for poor eyesight) and die in the war; he did serve, in the Navy, but survived. The Blythes are Quoted is an odd book, in both its structure and its preoccupations, but I think it’s interesting that Montgomery returned to her old characters to work though her concerns. She’d published Anne of Ingleside in 1939 - a domestic, cosy book, with a far more secure Anne (and an alive, if foreshadowed, Walter), but one of the things that’s always struck me about that book is an interchange between Anne and one of her young daughters with a new obsessive friendship, who demands whether Anne knows what it’s like to be hungry, really hungry. Anne replies that she was, often, in the orphanage before she came to Green Gables, and that she doesn’t like to think of those days now. But Montgomery hasn’t let Anne - or herself - forget them, and maybe that’s why she tried to use them as a shield or a warning for the war horrors closing around her.

This week on FilkCast - Episode 300

Rhiannon's Lark, Faithful Sidekicks, SJ Tucker, Tim Griffin, Ben Newman, Tom Smith, Cathy McManamon, The Unusual Suspects, Annwn, Valentine Wolfe, TomBoat

Available on iTunes, Google Play and most other places you can get podcasts. We can be heard Wednesday at 6am and 9pm Central on scifi.radio.

filkcast.com

Entry tags:

High Resolution

I happened, by pure chance, to see a link to the stream at the moment when the latest Starship flight test launched. Now, I'm sitting here, watching high resolution video coming back showing me the curvature of the Earth.

This is just amazing. I remember grainy video from Gemini when I was a kid.

I'm spending a lot of time saying this today, but wow.

Entry tags:

wiscon,
wiscon 2025

Wiscon report

This year's Wiscon was all-online, and billed as a "gap year," with fewer program items than I'm used to, and no dealers room.

I went to two program items--a "US immigration law and worldwide fandom roundtable" and a panel on "the wild world of modern agtech and why isn't it showing up in current SF."

The roundtable was about as cheerful as you'd expect, with a lot of discussion of both past and feared legal difficulties in traveling to cons, and alternatives like smaller gatherings and online cons. Most of us thought that online wasn't as good as in person, but that it's significantly better than nothing. (There may be some selection bias here: people who didn't think an online con was better than nothing wouldn't bother attending.) And a couple of people noted that their choice has been online or nothing at least since 2020, for reasons like disability or budge that don't have much to do with Trump.

The panel on current and future agriculture was fun. Some of the "what SF is getting wrong" was about TV and movies, showing a garden plot that's much too small for the population it's allegedly feeding, and that the fictional future is even worse/stupider about monoculture than the real world today.

Other than that, I hung out on the Discord server. Most if not all of the program items were recorded, and will be available to convention members for a week after the end of the con, but I may not get around to watching any of them, even less interactive things like readings and the guest of honor speeches.

Entry tags:

gaming

Gaming Update

It's been all Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 all the time. I've finished the game and am now XP-hunting post-game to get a character to level 99 (which will get me a trophy), and then I have to start a new game + to get the only other trophy I need for platinum, because I missed it in the prologue in my first playthrough. I've enjoyed it a lot! The gameplay is fantastic - the parry/dodge mechanic holds out the glimmering possibility that you can get through a battle totally undamaged once you know the right timing - and the character mechanics are also great, although I'm still struggling to master Sciel's. The story is gloomy and intriguing and very touching, and the voice acting is amazing.

Are there things I don't like? Hmm. I could have done with clearer signalling about when to do the finale versus explore the rest of the world, because I assumed I needed to beef up a bit and I ended up wildly overlevelled. All the bosses have cut scenes/new attack gimmicks when you reduce their HP by certain amounts, so if you one-shot them you miss out. I should have downgraded my damage but it's tricky - initially you're capped to 9999 max damage, then you lose the cap entirely (I think my highest damage so far is about 7 million), but if you're dealing with a boss who has 5 million HP it's pretty slow if you go back to 9999. There are no manual save files, which fits thematically but is occasionally super unhelpful. And then there's the platforming - I am not a natural platformer, there are some clipping/box issues anyway, but I did grit my teeth and do the Only Up Gestral minigame (in which you have to jump up/climb between bits of structures for AGES, and if you fall it's all over unless you manage to land on a lower bit) over and over again until I finally got it.

But the characters are fantastic. Maelle, especially, and Esquie, and Lune, and Verso, and Gustav, and on, and on. It looks amazing. I love the shrunken overworld (which reminds me of Fantasian's dioramas) and the French bits, and the music. I have many, many thoughts about the ending I got, all of which are spoilers, but I will definitely replay it.

Entry tags:

Your Lying Eyes

If all of these posts I am seeing explaining they are fakes are really fakes, we are all doomed. I mean, who are you going to believe? Me, or your lying eyes?

Apparently Google has dropped something called Veo3. And if it can be believed, this little AI tool is making fake videos really easy. And cheap. For example (assuming I can embed this link below):

You need a dog.

Wow.

Geez, maybe today is not the day to hang out at /r/whatsthatbook....

OP: Hey, looking for a board book series from when I was a kid! It was traditional fairy tales and fables, and the part I really remember is the illustrations! I'm sure if I see those illustrations I'll know it's the right book!

Me: Care to describe these illustrations? Even a little? Were they brightly colorful or more muted, or maybe black and white? Were they realistic or cartoony?

OP: Oh, they looked similar to the hare and the tortoise board game! Like, when I saw that I first thought it was the books!

Me: Oh, I guess you're gonna make me google that instead of providing a link, cool.

Guys, it turns out there are at least five different editions of this game, each one with a totally different art style.

Meanwhile, on a different thread on the same post:

Other Commenter: Could it be Aesop's fables?

Me, silently: WTF, buddy? That's not a suggestion.

OP: Oh, no, it was more colorful than that!

Me, a bit less silently: WTF? Like... what edition are we talking about? You need to help us help you!

All comments are paraphrased, but seriously.

Edit: I am absolutely dying at this point to ask who, exactly, OP thinks Aesop is, but that conversation is not going to go anywhere productive. I'd really better forget the whole thing.

Tech/code question

I'm trying to write a scene where two co-workers are trouble-shooting a new custom security or encryption routine. Someone else (who isn't present) wrote the code and he will have been careful to ensure it works before sending it to them. So maybe something in the implementation of it?

The scene is dual purpose, showing their interaction growing closer while also hiding something else in plain sight. The tech part of it can be whatever is plausible and easy to convey without bogging it down in details. I am so out of touch with that sort of thing I don't know what's plausible any more.

What could go wrong with uploading the new code into their office network or onto their phones which would need a bit of trouble-shooting? The kind of thing one person might overlook and another catch. Preferably with them being literally close while they do this. And again - easy to convey without bogging it down in details. Jargon is fine.

Edit: Turns out jargon is not fine. Well it would be in the sense I meant, but that's not how it was taken. Am overwhelmed by how much I can't understand well enough to follow here, let alone distill into a few phrases. I know the readers for my lakorn-novel are non-existent but I can't swamp them with details.

Edit 2: Sorry to have bothered everyone. I'm just going to trash this. It was a stupid idea in the first place. Thank you for your time.

Entry tags:

Saying, what no flagellants - then thinking, actually, might be preferable

Was alerted to Zoom seminar I must have signed up for ages ago and not put into my diary, with link, approx 30 mins before it was due to happen.

Well, that was interesting and informative: 'Protest and Identity Formation in the Time of Covid: The UK in Historical Context', if ultimately rather grim.

Given that I am in the cohort that thinks the response of The Powers That Be was very much in the Day Late and a Dollar Short ballpark and marked by gross ineptitude even where corruption was not in play, I had not realised how much there was resistance based on the belief that it was an excuse for the imposition of The Iron Heel (and this crisscrossed a wide spectrum of beliefs).

And a lot of the evidence for that was actually not widely reported.

And one observes that there are doubtless differences between the overall picture and the impact of immediate local policing practices.

But looking at what one might consider the wider penumbra of the panic (the torching of 5G towers e.g.) I was reminded (I would be, wouldn't I) of some of the episodes in Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millenium, especially as the speaker invoked the Black Death as a comparison point for epidemic + social upheaval.

(no subject)

I should start pulling more of my Facebook entries over here. Here's my most recent:

Wanna get started with Freeway Overpass Banners? Found the link for Backbone Campaign's overpass banner making zoom workshop for tonight at 8 EDT (first was 5/22) - scroll down, & forward to those interested.
https://www.backbonecampaign.org/workshop_20250527

Well actually my most recent was responding to the news that HHS just announced c19 updated vaccines no longer recommended for healthy children are pregnant people, and I invited people to go look up the long covid rates including for children and teens and just why it's more dangerous to have covid in pregnancy.

I need to get back on the road. I just drove out to Winchester for a blood draw, my penultimate lyme vaccine trial visit.

Heather Cox Richardson's post for today spends time on West point but also reminds us that there were 23 states attorneys who started preprep for all the legal challenges we've seen back in February of 24, starting with close reading of Project 2025. Many of us are far from impressed with most Senate Democrats, but it's worth realizing that they are not the entirety.

It was a really good weekend, even if I couldn't manage to do all the things I wanted to do and missed things I would have liked to do.

Entry tags:

Two Ethics Quests from Ask A Manager

I am having trouble including the link, due to not being able to see properly. sorry about that.

1. Manager husband is cheating with a much younger employee ( Read more... )

2. My employee has terrible attendance issues … in this economy? ( Read more... )